Tag Archives: Resiliency

The past week’s tumultuous downward spiral, global banking interventions and stock market spike speak to the need for organizational resiliency everywhere. I’m speaking primarily to those of you who are scrambling this week to get your shop under some semblance of control in the wake of your market’s turbulence. You’re desperately seeking answers and you’ve heard or read somewhere that workflow management and business process management (inclusive of documentation, analysis, design and re-engineering) can transform the way you do business. The promises are lofty but, like technology, workflow management and BPM are essential tools. The difference is not in saying “we do BPM” but in the way that you implement BPM in the social, cultural, and operational fabric of your organization. The value and benefit is in HOW you use BPM. But the bottom-line is BPM produces a degree of resiliency not possible without it. That may be a strong opinion but I will stand by it. One cannot adapt to invisible conditions. BPM makes conditions visible and adaptable. You do the math.

BPM Builds Resiliency

To contend that BPM builds resiliency is not quite complete. It makes resiliency possible. It is the lens through which you can identify your resiliency needs. Without visible processes, you have to rely entirely on anecdotes, opinions and assumptions concerning your strengths, weaknesses, productivity and efficiency. All of which vary from one employee, supervisor or director to another. Social constructs like that are always relative. BPM is the closest thing we have to a mechanical view of your enterprise and much less susceptible to relative interpretation. A business process model is the shortest and potentially most accurate model depicting what you do and how you do it. Imagine military leaders discussing strategy and tactics in the midst of battle rather than at the perimeter of a table housing a model of their battlefield and you begin to get the picture. If you’re in the thick of the trees, it’s tough to see the forest and your place in it. If you’re slogging it out in the muck, it’s tough to develop an adaptive strategy with your mates.

Resiliency is about adapting to conditions and bouncing back from blows. Adaptation requires knowledge of conditions in the environment or ecosystem as much as it requires knowledge of ones own capabilities, traits and resources. There is no substitute or alternative at the moment for BPM in demonstrating, reflecting, modeling and measuring conditions in both the company and its market. It’s the shortest route to a complete assessment and planning.

Measures and Metrics Count

Notice that adaptation is also a function of measuring conditions. Unlike natural selection processes which might favor traits and capabilities honed over decades, centuries, and millenia, we need immediate access to accurate data concerning our strengths and weaknesses. Our environment is changing much too fast to wait for year-end results. BPM will equip you with deep knowledge of what it is you need to measure. A high-performance entity measures in surprising ways and – of course, – what gets measured varies widely across industries. However, what gets measured gets managed. It’s not what you expect that will change deliberately. It’s what you inspect.

Break The Rules?

Our experience with economic upheaval ought to be having the effect of causing you to challenge your assumptions, myths and deep-seated beliefs in the rules you follow. Not sure what rules govern your business? Don’t worry, that’s what BPM will help you discover. BPM establishes the rationale for process and articulates the business rules you follow. Upon identifying your business rules, challenge them. If you can break them and establish new rules without breaking the law or any ethical/moral codes and without compromising your quality, customers, employees or mission then you will be participating fully in your own adaption and resiliency. How about that!

If the rules you live by don’t change while the economic and market forces around you are changing at the speed of light (as they have been for a month or two) then, my friends, you will get left behind. Don’t let this happen.

Up and Down

Like the roller-coaster we’re on, you need to assess what you’re up to at the macro levels of strategy and economic/market factors as much as you do at the more micro levels of business process and key performance metrics. Inside, out, up and down. Many of you are new to this field. Some of you are new analysts and some of you are executives. All of you may be wondering if business process management is right for you. The answer is that it is essential.